Downloaded from Manchesterhive.Com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM Via Free Access

The dispeopled kingdom: the hidden self in Beckett’s short fiction

Preceding chapters have examined the experience of primal disconnection in several of Beckett’s works. Murphy’s failure to recognize emerging, loving feelings, Watt’s inability to connect to an enduring, whole internal presence, the disrupted, enmeshed relationships in Waiting for Godot, the images of primal maternal absence in … but the clouds …, Footfalls and so forth, all reflect a central feeling-state of non- recognition within narrative-self. This chapter focuses on first-person short fiction, exploring primal ruptures within the narrative-self in the direct fiction, as well as in the ‘created’ tales of the narrator. The first section examines ruptures of the primary nursing bond in the Nouvelles (‘The Expelled’, ‘The Calmative’, and ‘The End’) and in the Texts for Nothing. The next section examines central feeling-states within the Nouvelles; specifically how aspects of primary dis-connection weave themselves through this little trilogy in a manner parallelling the development of the story. The narrator’s own ‘recollections’ of childhood experience are re-enacted in his own ‘current’ tale, as this re- working acts as self-containment. The following section examines the Texts for Nothing, how the narrator experiences aspects of the self as threatening, invasive, or even hostile. The narrator’s struggle to create fiction, and the struggle to be born psychically, are equated as manifestations of a true self. The core self maintains its viability through hiding, splitting-off aspects of itself into fiction, struggling against powerful internal ‘voices’ (i.e. early internal objects felt to be alien). This is a version of Guntrip’s regressed ego, a self that is not entirely free or viable, residing in a place where it struggles to live, love and create. It relates to Winnicott’s ‘true self’, the authentic core of being that requires the mother to mirror in such a manner that the infant’s primary omnipotence is not prematurely ruptured (see Phillips, 1988: 127–37). The primary intention of this chapter is to elucidate the hidden, unfulfilled sense of the narrative-self, in relation to an absent other

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 172 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 173

within. The dominant experience remains that of a self that speaks without a sense of being heard, of being seen, in any authentic manner. When the primary, maternal auditor within the narrative-self is not simply absent, but malicious or controlling, the infantile, creative part actively hides within its own narratives. The final section of this chapter acts as an integrative conclusion to this study; it examines the use of projective identification, and the splitting of the narrative-self, in the late story ‘The Lost Ones’. This complex story illustrates the central arguments of this study: the struggle for cohesion within the Beckettian self, its fragmentation as a consequence of disruption in primary infant-self–mother connection, the reflection of the rupture in the imagery, associations and use of the text, the use of various defensive strategies, the blurring of self and other that is the hallmark of very early experience and, finally, the coalescence of psychological birth and the origins of fiction-making within the primal relationship.

Time for Yum-Yum Aspects of early nurturing experience pervade the Nouvelles, often infil- trating the flow of a narrative. Occasionally, a fantasy/memory of ruptured early nurturing disrupts a story generated intentionally by the narrator to calm himself; this often occurs when there is a failure of self- soothing. The title of ‘The Calmative’ suggests not only the vial of sedative given by a stranger to the narrator, but the actual effect of the telling of the fantasy/fiction itself. In that story, the narrator tells a story to contain himself, since he is beset by disintegration anxieties predicated on loneliness: ‘For I’m too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tearings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on the unshakable pillars’ (61). There is a defensive sense of sanctuary in the silences between heart beats, like the long lapses of Murphy’s mentor Neary; more fundamentally, these lapses suggest a terrifying disconnection that is elaborated in ‘The Lost Ones’. In ‘The Calmative’, the narrator appears as a debilitated, dispossessed old man, wandering alone in the city. He has escaped, for the moment, an internal ‘den’ of schizoid anxiety, with ‘assassins […] in this bed of terror’, but in ‘his distant refuge [i.e. an imagined past or a psychic retreat within the self, he is …] weak, breathless, calm, free’ (62). Walking through the world as an invisible, despised alien, he meets a small boy, ‘holding a

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 173 23/9/02, 11:03 am 174 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

goat by a horn’, who looks at him ‘without visible fear or revulsion’. The boy, he believes, has come to see him out of curiosity: this Watt- like ‘dark hulk […] abandoned on the quayside’ (66). This boy moves the narrator, and he tries contacting the child, but the only sound that comes is a sort of ‘rattle […] due to long silence’.1 Nonetheless, this boy shows affection for the narrator, and ‘without letting go of his goat he moved right up against me and offered me a sweet out of a twist of paper’ (66). There is a condensed quality to the exchange – the pre- verbal ‘rattle’ of communication, so death-like, is heard by the boy-as- auditor, and he provides maternal concern and early nurturing to the narrator-as-infantile-self, reminiscent of narrator-Sam’s holding of Watt after the latter has had a psychotic breakdown. In this condensed scene, the narrator also identifies with an aged, dying parental figure, and the boy acts as a caretaker. This reflects a confused, congealed internal experience; the internal mother feels alien, withdrawn, with the boy-as- infantile-self, witnessing, helpful, hopeful he can heal the rupture between them. The infantile-self also resides within the narrator-as-old- man, depressed, unseen, and wishing for a maternal concern projected into the child. The boy’s maternal acceptance seems primary, and it creates a natural, loving attachment essential to the formation of a coherent self. However, it is only through a split-off aspect of himself (i.e. the fictional character of the boy, created in his ‘tale’) that holding becomes possible for the narrator. This is demonstrated later, when, wandering alone, the narrator approaches a man: ‘Excuse me your honour, the Shepherds’ Gate for the love of God! […] I drew a few steps ahead, turned, cringed, touched my hat and said, The right time for mercy’s sake! I might as well not have existed. But what about the sweet?’ (71, italics mine). The non-recognition of the world/mother generates invisi- bility, the narrator sees himself as a pariah, begging for contact on the margins of the world. He moves from asking for an affirmation of his identity (i.e. his correct location, the time), to eventually begging for a ‘light’, feeling non-recognition tear at his sense of existence. He retrieves a sense of being by connecting to the maternal presence created by the boy’s feeding him the sweet in the earlier, primal, nurturing/recognizing moment. Failure in early nursing experiences often form a core around which feelings of depression and abandonment are built, something evident in patients suffering from eating disorders:

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 174 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 175

Ms E., a woman in her thirties, suffered from a binge eating-disorder. It became clear she would binge to defend against feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Her bingeing allowed her to reconnect to early maternal holding. She remembered being fed honey on a spoon by her mother at age two, to soothe her during a period when she suffered feelings of loss because of the birth of a sister. Exploring her feelings about herself just before a binge often led to fantasies/memories of primary abandonment. For example, on one occasion, a trigger was her feeling, while on a date with a man, that he preferred another woman. Underlying Oedipal feelings (that she could not compete sexually with other women) was a belief that this man, as mother, would not want to provide for her. In response to my interpretation that she had mistaken the penis for the breast, she sighed and agreed, stating that her greatest fear was that no man had enough to fulfil her insatiable love hunger. She feared she would end up starving on the street (like Watt’s ‘family’ she would be back ‘home to oblivion’ in a world without ‘buns’). What she enjoyed about bingeing was its aftermath, lying slobbering and groggy, feeling she was again an infant after a feed, sedated with her own ‘calmative’. This was a pleasant, calming experience of retreat, since like the narrator, she experienced the world as a hostile place in which she was an outcast. There was a vague hostility in this woman’s bingeing, related to a belief that her mother (like the character who gives the narrator the ‘calmative’ in the story) could not contain her depression, and would give her the honey to ‘calm her down’. Another patient, whose mother had given him a prescribed sedative as a young child because of his insomnia, felt the need as an adult for various alternative forms of self-soothing strategies, such as a low-playing radio, to replace the early medicinal- ‘calmative’ (that itself replaced his mother’s usual, patient listening to his anxious night-time ruminations). Similar triggers infiltrate the narratives of Beckett’s isolated figures, as they attempt to soothe themselves with their word/food stories. For example, a Mr Weir discharges the unwilling narrator of ‘The End’ from a sort of sanitarium, which served as a calming, maternal container. After leaving the building, he describes his progress through a garden, following a day of rain: The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said. I suddenly remembered I had not thought of asking Mr Weir for a piece of bread. He would surely have given it to me […] I would have gladly turned back, but I was afraid one of the guards would

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 175 23/9/02, 11:03 am 176 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

stop me and tell me I would never see Mr Weir again. That might have added to my sorrow. (81) Awe and wonder fill the narrator’s description of the natural world, though there is quiet despair because of the depleted, life-giving rain. The garden acts as a maternal mind, in which there is re-enacted disruption in the connection to a loving mother. The boy’s questioning is a natural extension of the early feeding situation, since the child’s epistomophilic instinct connects intimately to the mother’s nurturing stance. Here, though, the mother demonstrates blunt aggression towards her child and his curiosity, effectively cutting off his connection to her and to the world, things he wishes to take into himself. This is a direct reversal of the situation in ‘The Calmative’, where the boy-as-mother acts as a soothing, nurturing presence. It is of no surprise that the narrator’s first thoughts, following the fantasizing/remembering of this scene, are for food, and for contact with the kindly Weir/mother who would recognize and feed him. A hostile world, filled with a gang of guards, blocks access to this good mother, leaving the narrator wandering resigned and depleted, banished from his containing, maternal home. In Texts for Nothing 3, there is a complex interplay between feelings of early feeding, maternal containment, and an introjected despair that destroys contact with others: ‘And to start with stop palpitating, no one’s going to kill you, no one’s going to love you and no one’s going to kill you, perhaps you’ll emerge in the high depression of Gobi, you’ll feel at home there. I’ll wait for you here, no, I’m alone, I alone am, this time it’s I must go. I know how I’ll do it, I’ll be a man’ (110). There is hostility in the world, manifested as a fear the world/mother wants the narrator to die. Love is equated with dying, murder, invasive mani- pulation; this leads to a retreat, where no one will kill, and no one will love. Parts of the self become other, reflecting a common experience of individuals struggling with powerful imagos. One patient, for example, told me she had spent the night in deep remorse, fantasizing about ‘blowing her brains out’ to placate an inner voice that kept telling her she was ‘no good’ and ‘kidding herself’ to think she could maintain good grades in her university courses. The voice/aspect of herself was a condensation, reflecting a father who envied her, as well as a self- regulating aspect that contained, through threats, both her own aggression (i.e. her wish to ‘blow his brains out’) and ambition. There was an admixture of violence and possessive love – the voice also

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 176 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 177

guaranteed she would not individuate, and not go on to graduate school, leaving her depressed mother behind. The narrator of the ‘Text’ struggles with similar confused feelings – there is a reversal, as the persecutory voice takes the depression and separation anxiety into itself (‘I alone am, this time it’s I must go [italics mine]’), reflecting the actual origins of the feelings within the primal objects. There is an ambiguous, fantasy escape/exile to the ‘Gobi’, an isolated, barren place, but also a place of safety. Disintegration anxiety, triggered by a disengagement from the mother’s self-affirming love, often manifests (in dreams or fantasies) as isolation in oceans or deserts (Kohut, 1971), places that also offer safety from a hostile, retaliatory world. When the narrator does emerge into a fiction, it is as an infant within the loving containment of a maternal figure, a nanny who takes on primary responsibilities, holding and feeding him: ‘she’ll give me her hand […] if only it could be like that […] She’ll say to me, Come, doty, it’s time for bye-bye. I’ll have no responsibility, she’ll have all the responsibility […] Come, ducky, it’s time for yum-yum’ (110). Soon though, the narrator retreats into narcissistic isolation, cutting himself off from the possibility of primary engagement with this fantasy mother: ‘Who taught me all I know, I alone, in the old wanderyears, I deduced it all from nature, with the help of an all-in-one, I know it’s not me, but it’s too late now, too late to deny it, the knowledge is there, the bits and scraps, flickering on and off […] in league to fool me’ (110).2 He is unable to maintain contact with a good mother, especially a dependency on her as a conduit to reality and learning. Paranoia infiltrates the core self-experience, there is a blurring of self and other, a primal doubt about the authenticity of self-experience, and aspects of hostility initially attributed to the world now are ‘in league’ within. The narrator continues his attempt to create a loving otherness, inventing a friend, perhaps pure fantasy, more likely an amalgam of early inter- actions that provided some sense of containing love: ‘Quick, quick before I weep. I’ll have a crony, […] We spend our life, it’s ours, trying together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench in some oasis of public verdure, we’ve been seized by a love of nature […] Nothing human is foreign to us’ (111–12). There is a sense of urgency, before a sinking into despair, as the narrator finds someone to share a joy of the world, assuaging his sense of alienation. The fantasy is reminiscent of Sam’s holding of Watt in the sunshine, and the wish to connect within a beautiful garden/mind suggests a hope for primal, internal sanctuary within another. However, the feeling cannot endure.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 177 23/9/02, 11:03 am 178 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

He sinks into a terrified belief that others will draw him out, where he will be engulfed by them, and prevented from returning to the more predictable sanctuary of regressed hiding-as-death: ‘He’d nourish me […] ram the ghost back down my gullet […] with his consolations […] he’d prevent discouragement from sapping my foundations. And I, instead of concentrating on my own horizons, which might have enabled me to throw them under a lorry, would let my mind be taken off them by him’ (112).3 This fear of entrapped absorption into the other’s need is at the core of the schizoid dilemma. The primary feeding situation becomes distorted, the narrator believes his mother/friend would ram life ‘back down his gullet’, keeping him alive simply to assuage his own anxieties. This reverses the early mother–infant relationship; the narrator becomes an enslaved auditor/container. There is an echo of the passage in Watt, where Arsene describes his catastrophic ‘fall’, a rupture in early connection to a containing presence, as a ‘reversed metamorphosis’ (44). In this state, if one gives up authentic desire (as a prelude to psychological death), ‘life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it’ (44). Arsene describes a retreat from the world to a place beyond a yearning for contact. However, life becomes a constant lure, though it is a particular vision of life, one developed through powerful feeding imagery. The world (i.e. a particular world) forces itself into one’s body, and any attempt to expel it is doomed, as the bad food, the puke, returns until it is accepted. This harks back to Proust, where love means invasive possession: ‘One only loves that which is not possessed, one only loves that in which one possesses the inaccessible’ (35). Schizoid retreat becomes the preferred option, since engagement will mean the loss of the self (or the other): ‘We are alone. We cannot know and cannot be known. “Man is the creature that cannot come forth from himself, who knows other only in himself, and who, if he asserts the contrary, lies”’ (49). The expression of genuine, selfless joy in the world of another, which finds its basis in the sharing of life between mother and infant, becomes false; there is no possibility of an individuated love that allows for the preservation of an untouched internal space. Mr B., whose mother used him to contain her own primitive anxieties, shared this attitude; he believed love meant the loss of personal integrity and privacy. As an adult, he collapsed back into primary scene of engulfment; accepting any goodness from the world, particularly the love of an interested woman, reactivated his core fear

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 178 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 179

she was feeding him poison, and wanted to ensnare him into controlled dependency. A ‘reversed metamorphosis’ would occur, the woman became what she ‘really was’, a devouring mother unconcerned with his internal needs. Taking anything into his inner world was dangerous, since it meant dependence on the other’s goodness; he would have to trust the other to respect his right to say ‘No’. His words in a session reflect this: My life is like a board game you play over and over again, one thousand times you lose, then another thousand, and another, just keep losing until you feel like quitting. Then life comes around, and puts a bowl of shit in front of you and says ‘Eat it!’ and if you don’t you die, you just go along with it, or you try again and just comply. Its just life, always putting you down … there’s no point in having any feelings at all … what’s the point, just to get burned again, so just don’t feel anything at all, it’s safer. The sense of hope was deeply buried in this man, as any attempt at engagement was felt to be a prelude being used and discarded; he can only be ‘loved’ if he is accessible and controllable. His words find their echo in Arsene’s deterministic despair: ‘And if I could begin it all over again a hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the time before, the result would always be the same, and the hundredth life as the first, and the hundred lives as one’ (47).

A Krappy feeling In ‘The Expelled’, the narrator’s experience of being hurled bodily out of his own abode is as an expression of premature psychological birth. There is a clear hostility, the narrator is welcome neither within the house nor within the world outside, and the expulsion represents failing containment by a maternal mind. Like the walker in ‘neither’, two unloving, unreachable worlds entrap the narrator. Hearing the sound of the door slam comforts him as he falls, since this means ‘They were not pursuing me down into the street, with a stick, to beat me’ (47). The narrator is ambivalent about his expulsion, the house/mind appears both a sanctuary from a dangerous world, but also a place filled with hostile others. Like Murphy or Watt, he survives through artifice, ‘I still knew how to act at this period, when it was absolutely necessary’ (49). He imagines peaceful safety only in a boundless isolation, wishing for calm he raises his eyes to the sky ‘where you wander freely, as in a

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 179 23/9/02, 11:03 am 180 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

desert’ (49–50). The narrator describes an odd manner of carrying himself, attributing it to a childhood problem: I had the deplorable habit, having pissed in my trousers, or shat there […] of persisting in going on and finishing my day as if nothing had happened. The very idea of changing my trousers, or of confiding in my mother, who goodness knows asked nothing better than to help me, was unbearable, I don’t know why, and till bedtime I dragged on with the burning and stinking between my little thighs. (50–1). There is a severe disruption in the narrator’s early experience of himself and his relationship to the mother. He remains stubborn, refusing to go to her for help despite obvious, admitted physical suffering. Though he suggests she would like nothing better than to help him, the question remains why he resists this help. One possibility is a debased sense of self that allows toleration of such soiling as inevitable or deserved. One must question how it can be that a mother (or any other caregiver) could fail to notice this horrendous difficulty, and take steps to prevent it by questioning the child. This suggests the mother may not have been entirely available to the child for any number of reasons, or that despite his declaration of her good will, he does not experience her in that way. A patient once felt indescribable anger towards me, something she expressed as a silence. She said she would be able to speak to me if I were somehow different, connecting this to her refusing her mother’s food as a young child, saying she might have eaten if her mother were a different mother. There is also the possibility that the narrator’s soiling is an expression of rage towards the parent, as if to say: ‘I belong to you and look how filthy I am.’ In any case, the vignette is a statement of his early disconnection and estrangement from a social world. He goes on to say, not surprisingly, ‘I became sour and mis- trustful, a little before my time, in love with hiding and the prone position’ (51). He suggests his own past (of which the above vignette is an example) is full of meaningless, ‘juvenile solutions, explaining nothing’, and that there is no need ‘for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift’ (51). He attempts to dissociate from early self-experience, yet just at this point he connects directly to one of his ‘juvenile solutions’, an early, powerful feeling-state. Having barely avoided crushing a child while stumbling down the street, he goes on to say: He was wearing a little harness, I remember, with little bells […] I would have crushed him gladly, I loathe children, and it would have

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 180 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 181

been doing him a service, but I was afraid of reprisals […] One should reserve, on busy streets, special tracks for these nasty little creatures […] all their foul little happiness […] they never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance. I personally would lynch them with the utmost pleasure, I don’t say I’d lend a hand, no, I am not a violent man, but I’d encourage the others and stand them drinks when it was done. (52–3) This narrator is not alone in Beckett in his distaste for children, a loathing based on a powerful envy for the child’s joy in living, ‘all their foul little happiness’; this envy connects to his own early life.4 Whether through stubbornness, rage, or a sense he will not be cared for, that a child would stand, sit, and walk all day covered in its own faeces, suffering both the physical pain and inevitable mocking of other children, can only be explained by a severely damaged sense of self. The narrator reveals an intensely withdrawn, disengaged connection to his own body, and to social life, that echoes Winnicott’s description of descent into a false self-state. There is also a sense of proud defiance, nobly defensive, that mirrors Lucky’s marginalization as a depreciated part of the underlying narrative-self. The narrator’s own rendition of his childhood experience parallels his own role as a fictive aspect of a cohesive underlying self, one which is shamed and feels shunned. The envy directed towards the happy children reflects a part of himself that he is no longer (or perhaps never was) in contact with. His raging desire to attack children is an identification with a primary internal object felt to be hostile to the joyful parts of the child’s self. This may explain his tolerance of the soiling, since he cannot truly imagine another caring for him, though he tacitly denies this. These passages develop a sense of the world as uninterested or hostile, and the genesis of this feeling early in the narrator’s life. The narrator’s hostility becomes more evident as the narrative progresses into ‘The Calmative’, where he is ‘too frightened to […] listen to [himself] rot’ (61). He decides to tell himself a story, to help pass the time and mute his fear. Again, it is a narrative of displacement and ejection, of hiding within a hostile city, within a failed, primary container projected outwards. Finding himself at the foot of a staircase, he begins to climb, ‘like one hotly pursued by a homicidal maniac’ (68). Panting, straining, he reaches the top where he meets, ‘a man revolving in the other direction, with the utmost circumspection. How I’d like to push him, or him to push me, over the edge. He gazed at me wild-eyed for a moment and then, not daring to pass me on the parapet side […]

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 181 23/9/02, 11:03 am 182 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

went back the way he had come […] all that remained to me was the vision of two burning eyes starting out of their sockets’ (67–8). This reflects the paranoid stance dominating the narrative-self, manifested here in the narrator’s own fictional associations. Feeling pursued, he climbs fearing for his life, only to find himself harbouring both homicidal and suicidal impulses. His projections into the other man allow for a sort of ‘twinning’. He stares into his own sadistic eyes, alternatively fearing for his life and hoping it will end, but also wanting to kill the other (experienced as sadistic and ‘homicidal’) in himself. His murderous desires are manifestations both of rage (a wish to destroy the other) and a wish to destroy that part of him so fuelled by hate. He hints at this, asking: ‘Into what nightmare thingness am I fallen?’ In this collapse into the depths of the Paranoid Schizoid Position, the world becomes a ‘thing’ – there are neither persons nor a coherent experiencing ‘I’, only hostile persecutors, as terror and sadism fill the internal universe. The experience of Ms A. elucidates this experience; this woman feared autonomous existence, since it precipitated a sense of maternal abandonment. She presented this core fantasy/memory: During long periods of abandonment, she would mimic her mother’s hateful stare while looking at herself in the mirror. She became, alternatively, hated/hating mother, as well as hated/hating child, while the reflection would contain the four complementary roles in a sequential condensation. Likewise, the narrator, for whom the meeting in the tower is a fantasy, appears to have placed a powerful, primary imago outside of himself. The ‘man’ he confronts, with burning eyes, is another manifestation of internal forces that keep him lying in fear; predatory enemies fill his internal space, whom he struggles to kill or put outside.5 Yet, he senses this state is not absolute, and appears to wish for deliverance. Soon, ‘a little girl came into view followed by a man holding her by the hand, both pressed up against the wall. He pushed her into the stairway, disappeared after her, turned and raised towards me a face that made me recoil’ (68). Implied violence again centres on a threat of harm to a child, another recurrence of a painful, internal drama, though in this scene a loving parent protects the child (although the threat to her is veiled, vague, and it is not clear from whom it comes). The sense of the self as variously pathetic and ridiculous, or raging and endangered, continues into ‘The End’. After leaving a sanitarium to re-enter the world, the narrator finds that ‘[His] appearance still made people laugh, with that hearty jovial laugh so good for the health’ (81).

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 182 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 183

An enduring self-depreciation follows on from the childhood memory of ‘The Expelled’, as the narrator sees himself as dirty, laughable, and an object of derision, yet with a vague hope of remaining usefully amusing. Such a self-view protects against a hostile world, the self is already devalued. This allows a hiding within the internal persecutory world (and from one’s own rage), just as the narrator hides within the city in the actuality of his story. He is indeed a pariah: resting near a water trough, he notices a horse that appears to be watching him. Again, there is a sense of suspicious disgust, one echoed later in Film. In that piece, some dominant images are of citizens’ aghast, revolted looks, as they encounter the character ‘O’, a withdrawn, devalued part of the self pursued through a depleted inner landscape by an observing, perhaps hostile, part of the self that is felt as other.6 The narrator of ‘The End’ is not in complete withdrawal. Resting in the park at night, unnamed persons visit him, looking out for his safety: ‘It was a long time since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible’ (82). This is ambiguous – the ‘horrible effect’ can refer to a painful, now conscious, need, a softening of his schizoid shell that allows him to experience contact with others. This echoes Watt’s tears (upon leaving Knott’s house), which also reveal a need for attachment that is not fully experienced as an enduring part of the self. Alternatively, the very feeling of need can be the ‘horrible’ referent, suggesting a turning away from loving experience. The episode that follows demonstrates the living heart within the narrator, and within the narrative-self. The narrator, having finally found sanctuary in the basement of a Greek woman, discovers that she too occasionally ‘peeped in’ (84) to make sure nothing has happened to him, perhaps more out of concern for her own welfare than for his. There is some parallel to the scenes in Murphy, in which nurses observe patients in their cells, and this narrator appears to be the beneficiary of an apparently benevolent, but uncertain concern. Again, the symbolism suggests a withdrawn, internal place within the self, where the narrator/ self hides, yet is watched, bringing to mind the man/rat metaphor in Murphy, with its sense of uneasy dependency. Though this narrator remarks: ‘Fortunately I did not need affection’ (84), he demonstrates his need for companionship: Once I sent for a crocus bulb and planted it in the dark area, in an old pot […] I left the pot outside, attached to a string I passed through the window […] I sat down beside the window and pulled on the string to keep the pot in the light and warmth […] I manured it as best I could and

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 183 23/9/02, 11:03 am 184 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

pissed on it when the weather was dry. It may not have been the right thing for it. It sprouted, but never any flowers, just a wilting stem and a few chlorotic leaves. I would have liked to have a yellow crocus, or a hyacinth, but there, it was not to be. She wanted to take it away, but I told her to leave it. She wanted to buy me another, but I told her I didn’t want another. (84–5) This imagery touches aspects of the narrative-self-state; the narrator has a maternal connection to a dependent, child-like object. He needs the crocus to love and nurture, it forms an important part of his life, though the very name suggests an ambivalence towards living (i.e. croakus). He is reminiscent of prisoners who, during long periods of confinement, care for pets with which they develop deeply felt relationships. The narrator makes every effort to keep the plant alive, and there is poignancy in his effort to rig up a contraption through which it can remain in the light and warmth. This is reminiscent of the light in which the narrative-self places Celia, where she sits during her lonely afternoon waits for Murphy, feeling a connection to life. This narrator gives the crocus his own bodily fluids and wastes to survive; though there may be some hidden sadistic intent, it appears to be a genuine attempt to maintain a nurturing connection with another being, that is part of himself. His child-like mourning for the plant highlights this: he refuses to have it taken away or replaced. This connects to a more profound level of symbolization, since the plant represents the self-state of the narrator. The plant is the infantile aspect of the narrator’s core-self, and in trying to keep it alive he demonstrates his own struggle to remain attached to life since, like the plant, he feels decayed and withering. This scene reflects the relationship of the narrative-self to the narrator, since the latter, like the crocus, is kept alive, though on the margins of a full psychic blooming. Again, this is a double displacement: the crocus reveals the self-state of the narrator (much like May’s fiction revealed her own internal sense of disconnection), and the narrator himself reflects the internal self-state of the underlying narrative-self (much as May herself does, as a character).7 The narrator’s experience of himself as unworthy and disgusting soon becomes dominant again; the new owner of the house needs the room to house a pig. Shunned wherever he turns, he shuns an old friend: ‘He was delighted to see me, poor man’ (88). Staying in a ramshackle cabin, he finds himself unable to rise, and a cow saves him: ‘I tried to suck her, without much success. Her udder was covered with dung. I took off my hat and, summoning all my energy, began to milk

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 184 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 185

her into it. The milk fell to the ground and was lost […] She dragged me across the floor, stopping from time to time only to kick me. I didn’t know our cows too could be so inhuman’ (90). The feeling of unworthy alienation reaches its height, and in a grotesque parody of an early nurturing situation, the narrator feeds from a dung-covered breast, belonging to an uninterested cow/mother. His comment that the cow is inhuman is a poignant statement of the depths to which his self- esteem has sunk. Now, even among animals, he feels no enduring attachment is possible. A sense of paranoia permeates him: ‘I reproached myself with what I had done. I could no longer count on this cow and she would warn the others […] I might have made a friend of her. She would have come every day, perhaps accompanied by other cows’ (90). Having stolen milk from the mother (echoing Murphy’s escapades with ‘cowjuice’), the narrator fears a retaliatory response. Feeling guilty, he berates himself for his own inability to socialize, and concludes with a fantasy family of sorts, a herd of mother-cows, who would feed him. In this scene, there is a regression to a ruptured early sense of nurturing, a starvation/death within the mother. Not surprisingly, following this ‘it was all downhill’ (90), he ends up living in an abandoned boat that takes on the qualities of a casket. It becomes a last withdrawn haven for the self which, like Murphy’s garret, is a symbol of enclosing schizoid space: ‘There were times when I wanted to push away the lid and get out of the boat and couldn’t, I was so indolent and weak, so content deep down where I was. I felt them hard upon me, the icy, tumultuous streets, the terrifying faces, the noises that slash, pierce, claw, bruise’ (98). The self withdraws from a perceived, natural violence in the world, violence intentionally directed at it. The imagery suggests assault, even rape (‘hard upon me’), and frightening others fill the world, as sounds brutally tear into the self. This violence is reminiscent of Belacqua’s experience in ‘Dante and the Lobster’, Murphy’s assault by the sounds of the world, and so forth. In his little hideaway, there is a sense of safety as the narrator enters an almost foetal state, perhaps hoping for a rebirth: I waited for the desire to shit, or even to piss, lent me wings [i.e. to leave the boat]. I did not want to dirty my nest! And yet it sometimes happened, and even more and more often. Arched and rigid I edged my trousers and turned on my side, just enough to free the hole. To contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, and shit on it, ah that was me all over. The excrements were me too, I know, I know, but all the same. (98)

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 185 23/9/02, 11:03 am 186 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

This passage reveals the narrator’s enduring sense of his own badness; he is unable to protect his safe haven from soiling. This place is the last desperate refuge for the self in a universe of shit, which begins to encase and foul him. It is a regression to an early mental space, in which there is a final attempt to be loved, cleansed by a maternal presence within. The poison, the ‘shit’, now comes from within, as the narrator, now in a dis-connected foetal sac, uncontained by the mother (or by a mother that is ‘muck’ or poison) is slowly encased, suffocated. This recalls the images of the narrator of ‘The Expelled’ – there is a return to a state of child-like soiling, predicated by disconnection and rage at the world.8 There is a core condensation in this scene, central to the oeuvre, harking back to the imagery of the stone eggs, the nest, and the maternal sea. The narrator, as good mother, protects his living self within a ‘little nest’, resting on the edge of an eternal sea, an overwhelming universe, just as the narrative-self protects the narrator at this point in the telling. There is ambiguity, as the narrator’s contrivance and soiling of his ‘little kingdom’ can stand outside the narrative flow as a meta-commentary, merging with a narrative-self that destroys a pristine inner space for itself and its creation. Self and other, teller and told collapse, as poison infests both the narrator-as-mother and the narrator-as-self. Both the self within the boat/nest, and the self within the story/nest are murdered, drowned, yet paradoxically kept alive in a deadened, stone-like state. The narrator no longer can contain the poison, which represents an underlying self-state of anguished isolation. In the final scenes of the story, he has ‘visions’ that reconnect him to childhood, as he begins to imagine drifting out upon the water in his small boat. He is re-attached to his early life, and remembers looking out at the sea with his father: ‘I would have liked him to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things.’ (98–9). This final failure of attuned reparation by a loving parent coalesces his fantasy/fiction. It is no surprise he will soon apparently suicide, letting his little boat out to sea, and that he will take the calmative to ease him into an easy death, into a final engulfment by the ocean-mother (le mer/la mère), dreaming of a ‘story [he] might have told.’ (99), a statement that leaves vague the locus of responsibility for this narrative. The calmative, a concretization of his attempts to self- soothe through fantasy, by speaking to the mother/auditor, is taken back into the self. It allows a peaceful suspension within the engulfment of an unheeding maternal ocean, and the hope of a re-awakening, a rebirth, a re-connection in the next story, one that may be better heard.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 186 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 187

Within these stories, read as a whole, a primary sense of disconnection to an early maternal figure is demonstrated by the narrator’s self- depreciation, his self-soiling, his need to displace his love into other objects, and in the imagery of feeding and paranoia. They reveal intricate evasions of a disconnected, core self, demonstrate its despair, and its need to go on, both through re-working the experience (tales that might be ‘better told’), and in the telling that is itself life.

The hidden self The following section explores the narrative-self’s avoidance of exposure to internal others, as it hides to protect itself. This need to hide develops from a rupture in the earliest experiences with the primary object, leading to a sense that the self exists in a threatened state. This manifests in complex identifications and counteridentifications with the primary object (i.e. becoming like it, or alternatively, not like it). In Beckett’s later work, this experience becomes the clear focus of narrative-self, manifesting in highly complex constellations within the text. It is important to recognize the subtle, rapid shifts that occur within the texts, as the narrative-self oscillates between identification with a hostile or withdrawn other, and alternatively experiences itself as under attack by a hostile other/world. This is an exposition of experiences that form the foundations of mental life, as the infant struggles with powerful feelings of frustration and rage at the world, only to subsequently experience itself as under a hostile retaliatory attack now attributed to the world. The narrative-self can counter overwhelming feelings of primal disconnection, and retaliatory rage, by hiding within its own words. This is a complex, risky endeavour. At times, the self experiences its own words as originating in an identification with a hostile/withdrawn other, and feels trapped by another actually itself. Fictions are created to protect the self; these fictions elaborate the complex interplay between the core self and early experiences that have engendered feelings of anxiety, disconnection, and thwarted authenticity. The following vignette may elucidate these concepts: Ms A. had difficulty maintaining an enduring experience of herself as a coherent person with her own desires. A need to comply shaped her internal experience – self-erasure avoided a devastating withdrawal of love. Her internal world collapsed into a hostile, sadistic mother upon whom she depended as a frightened child that could not think.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 187 23/9/02, 11:03 am 188 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

Occasionally, she would identify with the hostile mother, becoming quite cutting herself. This echoed her actual mother’s own experience, shaped by early loss. Her actual mother was anxious and dependent and, unable to contain these feelings, projected them into Ms A. For example, the mother feared becoming overweight. She would send her daughter chocolates, which Ms A. devoured, feeling poisoned; yet she was unable to refuse her mother’s ‘attempt’ to be kind. She gained the weight that reflected her mother’s desire to eat, sparing her mother the anguish. This was an actualized projective identification; the mother then attacked Ms A. for being overweight. The manner through which Ms A. began to deal with these anxieties in her analysis mirrored a dominant strategy in the oeuvre. In short, Ms A. was an innately gifted actress; soon after our work began she decided to continue her theatrical education, something she had abandoned as a teenager since she felt her mother’s envy of her talent was overwhelming. Winnicott writes: ‘In regard to actors, there are those who can be themselves and who also can act, whereas there are others who can only act, and who are completely at a loss when not in a role, and when not being appreciated or applauded (acknowledged as existing)’ (Winnicott, 1965:145). Ms A. used her roles to become a sort of ‘transitional person’ in between these positions, who could contact, and hide, from her mother, by being understood, appreciated, and allowed to emerge as a coherent self. To quote Winnicott again: ‘It may even be possible for the child to act a special role, that of the True Self as it would be if it had had existence’ (Winnicott, 1965: 150). In her theatrical roles, Ms A. achieved this, and in its fictions the narrative-self reveals an authenticity that always fade, much like the ‘mother’ image in …but the clouds… does not ‘linger’, an auditor-audience that disappears within the self. Within her theatrical work, Ms A. felt she could safely enact complex exchanges with her mother. For example, in Agnes of God, Ms A. chose to play a psychiatrist who works with a young woman who has murdered her own baby. In this way, she explored her identification with me (as a good, containing mother/analyst) and our work around her own rage at her mother, whom she felt was a dependent infant she wanted to kill. She also wanted to kill off the part of herself she saw as a hopelessly inadequate infant. The role also helped her try to understand why her mother hated her so much, wanting to ‘kill’ off her authenticity. She could confront her mother, in character, without feeling the overwhelming anxiety she would have felt in real life. She recalled

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 188 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 189

playing a role in Autumn Sonata as a teenager, saying the line she always wanted to say to her mother: ‘You want the spotlight and you carried me in a cold womb’. She consistently chose roles that allowed her to enact primary experiences with her mother that involved rage, sadness, and loneliness, but most fundamentally a need to understand her mother, as the mother related to herself. Within Ms A.’s use of roles to connect secretly to early feelings with the mother, there appears to be a parallel to aspects of the Beckettian narrative-self. Ms A. felt overwhelming disintegration anxiety when trying to emerge as an enduring, coherent self. Through acting, she engaged powerful, internal imagos and experiences in a manner much like the narrative-self. She clearly described how a sense of being within the words of another allowed her to experience feelings that were actually part of her. If the internal mother attacked her for being authentic, she countered by pretending it was only play. The theatre acted as a transitional, containing object in which she felt safe. More accurately, it was the words of the playwright that allowed her to hide, to reveal herself in safety, within a fiction that was felt as real. In Beckett’s fictional work, the narrator often creates its own fiction as a means of ‘playing’ that allows for exploration of complex early feelings of rage, depression, and loneliness, all centred in the earliest mother– infant bond. This occasionally becomes direct, as the narrator of the story, a manifestation of the underlying narrative-self, creates a fiction in which we can see the process that reflects its own creation. As in Footfalls, the core of experience displaced by the dramatic figure, or the narrator, reflects not only its ‘own’ unconscious experience, but that of the narrative-self that creates it, a double displacement that explains the genesis of those aspects of the fiction. May can ‘create’ a playful fiction that reveals her own self-state, much as Ms A. could play within the words of the playwright, and in both cases the words are both their own, and not their own, at the same time. The following reading, of sections of Texts for Nothing, suggests that an important aspect of the text is its revelation of the struggle of the core, emerging part of the self to disengage from primary identifications with withdrawn, controlling, and even hostile early imagos. The stories concern internal experiences of entrapment and enclosure, generated within the self by aspects of itself, felt as other; parts of the self that contain intense feelings of failed primary experience appear to the emerging-self as hostile persecutors trying to bend it into conformity. Another vignette may clarify this:

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 189 23/9/02, 11:03 am 190 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

Ms F. came to a session in great distress, after another horrible night, during which she ruminated endlessly about her ‘badness’. The source of this attack on herself became clear: she had received the top mark in a course. Her creative, core self now faced the reality that she was growing in ways that were a great pride for her. The intense, near- psychotic attack on herself was generated by her identification with an early imago, envious of her life, but demanding of perfection. Family dynamics made this understandable – the mother used her daughter to contain her own ambitions, but also subverted her, to keep her at home. In her next session, Ms F. reported she had a fantasy of seeing her mother drowning. Instead of giving in to an urge to jump in and go down with her (she knew she would be dragged down), she found a stick and pulled her mother out. She related how the night before the sadistic attack on herself she had been helping her mother study for a course. When Ms F. grew tired and wanted to return to her own apartment, her mother went into a great panic, half-accusatory, half- pleading, telling her daughter she needed her to stay and help her. Ms F. felt guilty and panicky as she left her mother’s house, and I pointed out that she kept her mother close, fulfilling her demands; her mother was now in her, in the form of her anxiety. She laughed, saying that, in fact, the more panicky she became, the calmer her mother appeared. This is an introjection of a mother’s anxiety. Again, such internal states can occur early in life in ways that do not reflect any major maternal failure. The point, in specific relation to the texts, is the manner in which, within one unified self, there can be divergent parts of the self felt by the core self as hostile or persecutory. The Texts for Nothing present a predominant self-experience – entrapment within an enclosed space, where movement away is dangerous to the self (being opposed by early objects), and stasis is encasing. For example, the series opens with ‘Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on. Someone said, You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on’ (100). As so often in Beckett, there is a sense of a forced expulsion that quickly becomes undone. It is a wandering away from sanctuary, from a primary internal home, between the doors of ‘neither’; there is also a complementary sense of immobility based on fear. Fluctuation occurs throughout the work, between a self seeking to leave, and a self compelled not to leave, between a self seeking attachment, and one expelled. These complementary experiences form the heart of an early schizoid entanglement with a powerful, primary figure:

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 190 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 191

My rheumatism in any case is no more than a memory, it hurts me no more than my mother’s did, when it hurt her. Eye ravening patient in the haggard vulture face, perhaps it’s carrion time. I’m up there and I’m down here, under my gaze, foundered, eyes closed, ear cupped against the sucking peat, we’re of one mind, all of one mind, always were, deep down, we’re fond of one another, we’re sorry for one another, but there it is, there’s nothing we can do for one another. (102) This is an overt example of primal identification, and the merged oneness it engenders. The empathic response of the narrator to his mother’s pain is so intense he cannot distinguish actual rheumatic pain from fantasy, even after many years, and it recalls Ms F.’s confusion of her own internal calm with her mother’s anxiety. There is a despairing futility in the passage, and clear indication of an internal split (‘I’m up there and I’m down here’). The narrator experiences himself divided along a number of lines (e.g. between past and present, self and other, and so forth). The imagery suggests a deeper, more primal confusion, one related to early experiences with the mother. The I/‘eye’ is compressed, watching, starving, for food and emotional nurturing. There is violence suggested in the ‘ravening’, a ‘vulture’-like, patient wait for ‘carrion’ (perhaps a repetitive ‘carrying-on’ of a primal experience of anguished ‘carrying on’). There is confusion – does the infant perceive the mother as devouring, or does the infant experience itself in this way? The next line elaborates this confusion, the narrator is both ‘up there’ and ‘down here’, reflecting the child’s experience of the mother’s early physical position, as well as, perhaps, a contemporary sense of the internal mother’s aloofness. The self is ambiguously observed, by itself and the mother (‘under my gaze’), but since the eyes are closed, it is ill-seen – ‘foundered’, sinking (i.e. foundering) under the weight of on-rushing anxiety and non-recognition, yearning for a founding establishment within a finding maternal mind. The search for recognition continues in ambiguity, the ear is ‘cupped’, straining for living communication, against a peat/teat that itself sucks, reflecting its dual nature, both dead/decaying, and nurturing. The intense attachment of the narrator for his mother is clear, as is a final realization they are not one, and cannot connect in a fundamental way that would allow change. This echoes Ms F.’s fantasy of the drowning mother, though for the narrator there is a complete collapse of internal space, as the boundaries between self and other dissolve completely. The narrator’s enmeshment with a primary object is not always clear and discernible. Complex manifestations of the core entanglement

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 191 23/9/02, 11:03 am 192 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

with an ‘other’ often emerge through the narrator’s attempts to engage or disengage. Such a futile, frustrated enmeshment with a primary object can lead to hopelessness; that nothing can be done for another generates a joyless future since the self must suffer the same fate. The narrator of Texts for Nothing 2 suggests this: ‘A glow, red, afar, at night, in winter, that’s worth having, that must have been worth having. There, it’s done, it ends there, I end there. A far memory, far from the last, it’s possible, the legs seem to be still working. A pity hope is dead. No. How one hoped above, on and off. With what diversity’ (108). A memory complex/fantasy is experienced, at first, as exciting, desirable. Immediately, there is retreat to a less certain state (‘that must have been worth having’), the narrator no longer feels an autonomy that allows pure engagement with the world, an authentic ending. Ambivalence towards life is clear – hope is generated by the fact he is still mobile, but the statement ‘hope is dead’ undoes this. This hopelessness, too, is reversed (‘No’); finally there is an internal entrapment of a self experiencing itself as buried, enclosed in a deep internal space, Murphy- like in its withdrawal from the ‘diversity’ of life. The self becomes complete, needing only to observe, to hide from any newness in the world, with all that is strange kept away from it. The narrator of Texts for Nothing 3 expresses this feeling of an enclosed surrounding by dominant, hostile imagos that prevent authenticity. He asks: ‘Is it possible I’ll sprout a head at last, all my very own, in which to brew poisons worthy of me, and legs to kick my heels with, I’d be there at last, it’s all I ask, no, I can’t ask anything’ (113). The wish for a genuine, separate existence (‘a head’) is immediately thwarted within the self by reference to internal poisons that kill desire, creating the submissiveness implicit in the notion he is unworthy of asking for anything. There is an intricate connection between the experience of authentic selfhood and the feeling of liberated possibility that occurs when moving out from a schizoid retreat into full engagement with the world. This movement is eloquently expressed by the narrator: ‘See what’s happening here, where there’s no one, where nothing happens, get something to happen here, someone to be here, then put an end to it, have silence, get into silence, or another sound, a sound of other voices than those of life and death, of lives and deaths everyone’s but mine, get into my story in order to get out of it, no that’s meaning- lessness’ (112–13). This is closed internal space, without contact to a loving presence; it is an almost perfect description of Murphy’s inner world, the house of Knott, or Godot, places where nothing happens.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 192 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 193

There is a cry from the core self to create, to ‘get something to happen’, so it can end/die properly, followed by a fantasy of movement into silence, to other sounds, other voices, and to a final escape from the self altogether. There is no possibility of authentic connection, where others can be useful or accommodating; love is devouring. Soon after, the narrator describes a sense of happiness, walking with a caregiver: To set out from Duggan’s door, on a spring morning of rain and shine, not knowing if you’ll ever get to evening, what’s wrong with that? It would be so easy. To be bedded in that flesh or in another, in that arm held by a friendly hand, and in that hand, without arms, without hands, and without soul in those trembling souls, through the crowd, the hoops, the toy balloons, what’s wrong with that? (113) There is an initial connection, an actual engagement in life – one does not know what lies ahead, a possibility of authentic death. There is containment within living skin (‘flesh’), a loving holding, soon dismem- bered. The ‘walk’ takes on a child-like aura, but unlike the narrator of the Nouvelles, there is less envy for the happiness of the children. The narrator cannot stay long in this fantasy, he answers his own question with: ‘I don’t know, I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me […] here nothing will happen here, no one will be here, for many a long day […] and the voices, wherever they come from, have no life of their own’ (113). The lonely isolation is profound, made more poignant by a primary disconnection from the joy of an attached childhood. The voices that embody these figures are dead, hollow, much as the voices heard by the tramps in Godot. They speak of nothing so much as their own distance from any living heart within the narrative-self. In Godot, Vladimir pleads with Estragon to ‘say anything at all’ (63), when they fall into silence after discussing their own ‘dead voices’. This is a plea from the heart of the narrative-self, to be recognized, responded to, by a primary other that remains alive, though buried within its own narcissism.9 The sense of disconnection from loving internal objects is profound in the Texts, often felt as a failure of identity: ‘Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it is me? Answer simply, someone answer simply. It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist, in raw pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours’ (114). This sense of non-existence echoes Ms A.’s feelings, as she sought a sense of herself within the words of characters in the fictions of another. Without a primary, powerful other to whom she could subjugate herself she felt

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 193 23/9/02, 11:03 am 194 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

alone, an ‘accusative’ disconnected both from herself as subject, and as an object of another. There was also accusation in another sense, since she felt, as the narrative-self does, guilty for abandoning the other by individuating. This mirrored her internal attachment to a needy, elusive maternal figure, itself filled with a tentative, arbitrary being. The narrator echoes this: ‘And when he feels me void of existence it’s of his he would have me void, and vice versa, mad, mad, he’s mad. The truth is he’s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living’ (114, italics mine). This is a powerful statement of an embryonic sense of self within the narrator, experiencing a dominant internal other as he himself being dead, something due to the other’s envious wish to destroy authenticity within him. It reflects the wish of a primary object to project its own lifelessness into the self (i.e. ‘it’s of his he would have me void’, much like Pozzo’s sense of starvation is projected into Lucky). This is connected to a sense of madness (i.e. like May’s mother, ‘Mrs Winter’, in the fiction she creates). The use of the term ‘vice versa’ captures the sense of enmeshment as self-object boundaries break down, since the primary connection of love is replaced by annihilation anxiety, as life is confused with death.10 However, the narrator himself harbours murderous wishes towards this primary other. A means of escape is to treat him ‘like a vulgar Molly, a common Malone’ (115), that is, as disconnected fictions within himself: ‘what am I doing, having my figments talk […] that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough’ (115–16). It is a ‘story’ that becomes the only means through which the self can engage the world, since authentic living is always threatened from within by envious attack, or by a withdrawal of loving presence. Thus, the narrator’s eyes close to look ‘inside the head […] to look for me there, to look for someone there […] where to be is to be guilty. That is why nothing appears, all is silent’ (117, italics mine). This feeling of self-loss is coupled with a parallel feeling of aloneness, predicated on the notion that being is not allowed. Feelings of true authenticity are discouraged. This feeling is close to that of Ms A., for whom any joy or autonomy was immediately dampened by an implied or actual inner attack. The narrator feels that ‘one is frightened to be born, no, one wishes that one were, so as to begin to die’ (117). This statement reveals the dichotomous nature of the core experience of self-entrapment – birth implies either a terrifying reprisal from an unnamed source or, alternatively, a movement towards an already implied dead-end that makes life itself an unworthy venture. It is a

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 194 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 195

recurrent catastrophe, escapable only by a new beginning, a true birth that could lead to an authentic, individuated death that would be life. The fundamental feeling of self-burial, of hiding within an internal world dominated by hostile others, connects to the sense of being lost: ‘Did I try everything, ferret I every hold, secretly, silently, patiently listening? […] I’d like to be sure I left no stone unturned before report- ing me missing and giving up. In every hold, I mean in all those places where there was a chance of my being, where I once used to lurk, waiting for the hour to come when I might venture forth, tried and trusty places, that’s all I meant when I said in every hold’ (127). The core, emerging-self experiences itself as lost within a hostile space; it must hide to remain secure. This is an early maternal space, in which the self struggles to find itself properly held, in a ‘hold’, where it can begin to trust its containment. This passage reflects images often heard in analytical work, and touches on fundamental experience. Mr D., for example, often employed the word ‘ferret’ to refer to himself, and his need to enter secretly into the world of others. In this way, he tried to understand their attitudes towards him, to predict if their motives were hostile or benevolent. He imagined himself ‘weaseling’ within his own internal world as well, hiding among the shadows, trying to look at his own past in a way that would not disturb or infuriate powerful early imagos. The above passage brings to mind the ‘rat metaphor’ in Murphy, since the self envisions itself as mouse-like, frightened, and hiding from something living beyond the walls. This depicts an actual feeling-state, where a retreat to internal, enclosed spaces allows for a semblance of being within a threatening world. In this light, the phrase ‘where there was a chance of my being’ connects to a sense of haven, reflected in Arsene’s description of Knott’s house/mind as a place where the self can begin ‘to be’. This sense of being lost is difficult to maintain because of the emotion it triggers. Soon after this passage, the narrator comments: ‘Ah if there must be speech at least none from the heart’ (128), reflecting another retreat into intellectualization as a defence against awareness of self-estrangement. All this brings to mind Winnicott’s false self, the need to comply within a dangerous world where love is conditional upon one’s being a certain way. Failure to comply with these internal demands leads to a sense one is bad or being punished: Who says I desire them [i.e. various external conditions], the voice, and that I can’t desire anything, that looks like a contradiction […] Me, here,

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 195 23/9/02, 11:03 am 196 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

if they could open, those little words, open and swallow me up, perhaps that is what has happened. If so let them open again and let me out, in a tumult of light that sealed my eyes, and of men, to try and be one again. Or if I’m guilty let me be forgiven and graciously authorized to expiate, coming and going in passing time, every day a little purer, a little deader. The mistake I make is to try and think, such as I am I shouldn’t be able, even the way I do. (132– 3) Genuine desire immediately triggers disconnection from an authentic sense of self, a feeling that another controls the internal world, and is trying to create a ‘void’. This is experienced as an internal contradiction (reflecting the schizoid dilemma); the split is felt consciously, and the self’s own use of words becomes an autistic barrier to genuine feeling. The engulfing, devouring of the self by words is consistent with inauth- entic living, since a need to protect oneself within language suffocates genuine emotional experience. There is a poignant plea from the narrator to be allowed to live, to be in the light, among the living. This is immediately followed by the onset of fear, guilt and a further plea to be allowed to enter into a world filled with living time, where one can actually die (though there is also the recurrent, invasive sense of futility in the phrase ‘a little deader’). The comment that the only mistake is to try and think reflects the inner domination of powerfully felt others, and the last lines carry a militaristic tone (not unlike What Where or Godot), where the self’s only option becomes compliance. A sense that one does not actually exist develops, in a way, the safest position: Whom have I offended so grievously, to be punished in this inexplicable way, all is inexplicable, space and time […] It’s not me, it can’t be me. But am I in pain, whether it’s me or not, frankly now, is there pain? Now is here and here there is no frankness, all I say will be false and to begin with not said by me, here I’m a mere ventriloquist’s dummy, I feel nothing, say nothing, he holds me in his arms and moves my lips with a string, with a fish-hook, no, no need of lips, all is dark, there is no one. (133) The presence of a powerful, insatiable other is explicit, and the dissociation from the body (and equally from one’s feelings) is presented in a manner worked through again in Not I. In fact, these brief passages seem a sketch for the later piece, with a speaking voice, in a pain not felt as pain, talking into a felt void in which space and time collapse, a pre-verbal and motherless domain. The alternative to such compliance, originating because of harsh early objects, is a retreat into

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 196 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 197

nothingness reminiscent of Murphy’s final zone. Such feelings engender hopelessness: Give up, but it’s all given up, it’s nothing new, I’m nothing new. Ah so there was something once, I had something once. It may be thought there was, so long as it’s known there was not, never anything, but giving up. But let us suppose there was not, that is to say let us suppose there was, something once, in a head, in a heart, in a hand, before all opened, emptied, shut again, and froze. (141) Here is the genesis of hopelessness. There is an echo of Murphy’s world, where there is ‘nothing new’, along with a feeling there was once something that did bring a feeling of living joy (i.e. before the catastrophe of primary rupture). There is an almost organic quality reminiscent of the crocus and its aborted blooming, as the self opens to the world only to experience a catastrophic draining and a subsequent retreat into a frozen self-state. The self may possess the thought it once had something, as long as it manifestly knows this is false; this engenders the hiding that allows a semblance of being. Ms F. enacted such a dynamic in her university studies, often suffering endless torments before exams or the submission date for essays. She struggled to convince herself (and me) that she was stupid, and could never successfully create. Once, she brought me an essay, just before its submission. Though the essay was excellent, and was rewarded with a top mark, she had attempted to undo this by literally un-writing it; she had used an old printer, and the type was faded, ghostlike. In this way, she had something, but could counter internal accusations by claiming: ‘there was not, never anything, but giving up.’ Fantasy projections into others become the way the narrator engages the world, finding contact through fictional otherness: It’s a winter night, where I was, where I’m going, remembered, imagined, no matter, believing in me, believing it’s me, no, no need, so long as the others are there, where, in the world of the others […] and the power to move, now and then, no need either, so long as the others move, the true others […] wake again, long enough for things to change here, for something to change, to make possible a deeper birth, a deeper death, or resurrection in and out of this murmur of memory and dream […] he sees his body […] this impossible body, it’s me in him remembering. (149) Here is a self hidden from its own authenticity (‘remembered, imagined, no matter’), hovering on the edge of total withdrawal. It is through fantasy, an imagination not dead, that the core self can ‘go on’,

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 197 23/9/02, 11:03 am 198 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

with ‘the power to move’ in the ‘true others’. The passage reveals the wish for authentic birth, but also deep confusion, as the self feels itself part of another’s projections, and like Ms A., must struggle to remain ‘resurrected’ in each new tale. In these powerful early identifications and counteridentifications with invasive, internal objects, the core self struggles to maintain its autonomy. Through hiding, playing, creating its own fictions, the narrative-self screams out: ‘They? No, I!’

The dispeopled kingdom This final section, acting as a concluding synthesis for this study, examines the late story, ‘The Lost Ones’, in which many of the concepts discussed in earlier sections manifest in a highly complex, condensed form. In short, this piece consists of a narrator that has a highly ambivalent relationship to an aspect of itself, presented as a cylinder and a race of beings that live within it. The story depicts an entirely internal world, in which the narrator represents the core self, and in which the cylinder contains the split-off parts of an internal world/family. The relationship is condensed and fluid, with constantly shifting self/other boundaries, engendered by the earliest experiences of failing contact with the mother. The story exists at the primal edge of creation, of fictionality, born at the earliest moments of connection to the (m)other/ auditor within the narrative-self. As such, it becomes an experience about the possibility of life, and about the primal fictions that both require life, and allow it. The cylinder becomes a text – a primal tablet that is the mother’s containing mind, into which the narrator attempts to write his first tale, touching her mental space with his presence, and being held within hers. The narrator of ‘The Lost Ones’ describes the existence of a cylinder within which lives a race of beings. These beings cluster into categories; the cylinder appears to be self-contained, the existence of anything beyond it appears doubtful. This work has presented a number of difficulties for interpreters, and some of these may be resolved by working with the assumption that the text presents an entirely internal world. From this point of view, the narrator speaks from a position of authority concerning its own internal experience, and the text is a record of that experience. The most fundamental aspect of the self’s experience, the aspect developed through the narrative, is a particular type of very early experience with a primary object. For reasons not entirely made clear (though there are hints in the text) there seems to have been an

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 198 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 199

early disruption in the relationship of the self to its primary object. The self experiences rage and despair, and these feelings generate the creation of the cylinder. In essence, the cylinder and its contents can be viewed as parts of the narrator which, for reasons developed below, must be split off. The cylinder is an encapsulated area of experience under the control of the self, to a degree; however, there are equally aspects of the cylinder, and of the experience of the beings within, which are unconscious aspects of the narrator. Hill (1990) points out that the work is often viewed as a cosmological allegory; Finney, for example, feels it can be understood as a ‘model in miniature of man’s condition’ (Finney, 1972: 12). Hill also believes the presence of discursive markers (‘maybe’) and expressions of doubt in the text suggest that if it is an allegory, it is one of its own fabrication, a view shared by Brienza (1977: 148–68). The present reading suggests that the narrator both has control over the story-as-self experience but, at the same time, is also dissociated from aspects of it. This fluctuates depending on the nature of the projective stance at any given time. This is perhaps closer to Levy’s reading: ‘“The Lost Ones” concerns the limitations of narration far more than the torment of bodies in a cylinder. The story becomes a symbol or means of representing the movement of the narrator behind the story, and only by remembering this will we discover what necessity drives “The Lost Ones”’ (Levy, 1980: 98). This reading also sees the narrator moving behind the story, though part of the ‘created’ story (i.e. the world of the cylinder) is also the narrator and his internal world. The necessity that drives the entire piece is desire for connection and the response to failures of connection (i.e. rage, despair and hope). By understanding the role of projective identification within the piece, there is a possible resolution to a difficulty mentioned by Hill (1990: 155), concerning the contradictory omnipotence of the narrator, who seems to alternate between total authority and a less than divine status. The world of ‘The Lost Ones’, in reflecting the total world of the narrator, is within his ‘divine’ control. Alter- natively, since aspects of it are ‘lost’ to him via projective identification, he seems arbitrary, vulnerable to a sense of otherness within the narration. In the final analysis, it is, in fact, a ‘cosmological’ piece. However, it is a cosmology of two (primary object and self) that merge, reverse, and separate, as the self struggles to touch and be touched, to see and be seen, to hear and be heard. It is a primal tale, the creation of a self, through a textual cylinder in which the self places itself in an attempt to be understood, and loved.11

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 199 23/9/02, 11:03 am 200 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

Projective identification is the dominant mechanism at work in the piece. Aspects of the narrator’s self are experienced (for reasons that will be developed) as severely anxiety-provoking, to such a degree that they must be placed outside the self and kept within an other. In Klein’s view, the first ‘other’ was, of course, the mother, the primary object of the infant’s experience. Following this concept means the cylinder is the body/mind of the mother, as experienced within the internal world of narrator/infantile-self. The entire ‘story’ of the ‘lost ones’ is a record of a fantasy attempt to project aspects of the self back into the mother for containment. The other of the text is both the cylinder (experienced as another place, outside the self), and the beings within the cylinder, who are further split into various roles that reflect more specific aspects of the self-experience. Thus, the universe of the text exists along several planes – it is unitary (the narrator alone), a duality (the narrator/ cylinder), and a multiplicity (the narrator/beings). It is essential to recognize that all of these planes co-exist at the same time, and that this is possible because the universe represented by the text is predominantly within the Paranoid Schizoid Position. Within an internal world predominantly in this position, boundaries of self/other are fluid. This enables the self to protect its fragile integrity by projecting thoughts, emotions, and other aspects of itself into the other, where they can be processed and contained, to be returned to the self in a less anxiety- provoking manifestation. In this story, the narrator projects complex emotional states into the form of the persons inhabiting the cylinder, their emotional states, their primary desire to make contact, their ambivalence between hope and despair, and into the nature of the cylinder itself. There are also discernible aspects of this projected experience in shape of the narrative itself. This reflects the highly ambivalent relationship between the narrator and the shifting matrix of emotion contained within the world of the cylinder, which is, again, part of his own internal universe. The story relates the central, predominant theme of Beckett’s oeuvre, the struggle of a unified, coherent self to maintain its integrity under the sway of powerful internal anxieties, and its persistent attempts to deflect such anxiety by connection to a primary maternal figure. It is a hallmark of the Paranoid Schizoid Position (which underlies all subsequent human mental experience) that the mother is experienced in a contradictory fashion (with the corresponding self-experience); this is clear in ‘The Lost Ones’. The name, the ‘lost ones’, is ambiguous – the term can refer to the beings within the cylinder (they are lost parts of

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 200 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 201

the narrative-self), it can refer to the beings who are sought by the ‘searchers’ among the population of the cylinder, presumably for a sense of connection and wholeness, or it can refer to the beings as ‘lost’ in a hopeless, futile sense.12 Within the text, several predominant constellations exist. Firstly, the narrator, feeling severe anxiety because of failed maternal containment, is depressed and despairing; this is dealt with by projecting these feelings into the beings within the cylinder, some of whom (‘the vanquished’) are marasmic with despair and hopelessness. Alternatively though, the narrator can keep a sense of hope alive by projecting it into those beings within the cylinder that are searchers. There is a group that wanders in search of something/someone they feel is lost. Another spends time in the outer zone of the cylinder waiting to climb, and climbing, ladders leading up to niches on the walls, where they rest in solitude. Some believe a way out of the encased world exists. The relationship of the narrator to these beings fluctuates: on the one hand, there appears to be a raging, sadistic component (the narrator has the beings engage in violent acts when they feel frustrated), and he continually frustrates them in a world where attainment (of a way out, of finding a lost one) appears hopeless. In this sense, there is an identification with a primal, sadistic mother who is experienced by the infant, during inevitable failures in nurturing, as tyrannical and destructive. Thus, the beings within the cylinder become infantile-selves under attack and under the control of a dominant mother, or alternatively, a world/mother under the omnipotent control of a raging infant. There are equally moments of hope within the cylinder: the tenacity of the beings to search and to play suggests containment. It is a dead universe, and they are the ‘last ones’, but within the cylinder there is some sense of protection from the void. A ‘flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for sake of harmony’ (202) entraps the beings. Unwritten codes regulate movement and, among other things, access to the ladders. Temperature and a persistent yellow, sulphuric light modulate along a rhythmic continuum within the cylinder. The cylinder itself is a concrete symbol, reflecting both the internal world of the beings, and of the narrative-self, entrapped and closed off to spontaneous feelings of joy. What the beings appear to be searching for is a primal recognition that would allow separation from their despairing, hopeless state: ‘Press and gloom make recognition difficult. Man and wife are strangers two paces apart to mention only this most intimate of bonds. Let them move on till

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 201 23/9/02, 11:03 am 202 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

they are close enough to touch and then without pausing on their way exchange a look. If they recognize each other it does not appear. Whatever it is they are searching for it is not that’ (213). The piece is condensed, ambiguous – the relation of the narrator to the encapsulated world fluctuates like the temperature and light within the cylinder. On one hand, the narrator’s self-state is itself depressed and withdrawn – the tone of the work is mechanical, lifeless, reading like an engineering treatise: ‘Omnipresence of a dim yellow light shaken by a vertiginous tremolo between contiguous extremes. Tem- perature agitated by a like oscillation but thirty or forty times slower in virtue of which it falls from a maximum of twenty-five degrees approximately to a minimum of approximately five whence a regular variation of five degrees per second’ (205–6). The description of these lost people and their travails is equally muted and cold, as if they were themselves automatons: ‘Consequences of this climate for the skin. It shrivels. The bodies brush together with a rustle of dry leaves. The mucous membrane itself is affected. A kiss makes an indescribable sound. Those with stomach still to copulate strive in vain. But they will not give in’ (202). There is a suggestion these bodies are purely internal, since the sounds they make resemble ‘the rustle of dry leaves’, an echo of the tramps’ dialogue in Waiting for Godot, where the invisible voices are also likened to the rustling of leaves, and to Watt where Knott’s voice resembles a wind in the bamboos. Here the primary organ of touch, the skin, is dried and damaged. The original modality of communication between the self and the world, Freud’s ‘body-ego’ is dried, sucked of life, and the sounds of internal procreation become macabre, as the internal, parental couple is damaged and depleted. It is therefore no surprise that the narrator has difficulty linking thoughts in a spontaneous, living way: the text, a record of creation, reads like an abstract or an outline for a movie script. To overcome a loss of inertia the narrator appears to ask himself a question: ‘[What are] the consequences of this climate for the skin?’ (202), before proceeding to imagine/remember the answer in the moment; this pattern occurs many times in the story. Such difficulties in linking thoughts reflect the ambivalent relationship between the narrator and the beings. In so far as they are lost, despairing parts of the self that are projected, without a primary contact to the narrator, the break in linking and the mechanical nature of the prose acts as a dissociative defence against despair – the self is not like the beings, they are merely an exercise in fiction. On the other hand, to the degree that the narrator experiences the beings as

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 202 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 203

others who are being sadistically punished, the blocking of associative flow is a result of intense rage, suggesting a fear of retaliation by the others, who are envied for living. This reflects a primary identification, within the narrator, with an envious, sadistic, or absent primary object that he recreates in his relationship with the split-off beings. The following clinical example may elucidate this: Mr D. was a deeply withdrawn man, for whom a feeling of ‘succeeding’ in analysis (which meant impressing or pleasing me with his thoughts) was of paramount importance. He felt that comments I made one day, regarding his propensity to try to engage me in dialogue, were deeply hurtful. He arrived at the following session to explicitly ‘produce’ interesting material. He proceeded, in a manner eerily similar to the narrative style of ‘The Lost Ones’, to develop a long, complex fantasy that included his mother, various other family members, and me. There was the same ‘exposed’ quality to the process, as he openly tried out an idea before proceeding with the fantasy. For example, he would say, ‘She is sitting on a rock. What kind of rock? A large rock by the water, no, it is by the side of a mountain.’ There was also a sense of entrapment, not only in the rigidity of the fantasy, but in its content; the tale continually circled around rage towards the characters, as well as a feeling of sadness. This man used this fantasy to dissociate from his own feelings of rage and despair; I had deeply offended and abandoned him, by mis-hearing his attempts to connect with me in earlier sessions. The characters in the fantasy became internal ‘others’ he manipulated to regain a sense of control over his fragmented inner world. From this perspective, the narrator becomes a raging, envious primary object that seeks to extinguish and humiliate any effort of the beings directed towards enjoyment in life. The cylinder becomes a part of the mind where life itself is tortured and destroyed. This is reminiscent of that part of Mr D.’s mind that would, as a child, entrap animals in boxes to gain a measure of sadistic control over them, and counterbalance feelings of impotent rage. These boxes functioned, in this sense, as the cylinder. The beings are a condensed, complex symbol, representing both the living, loving parts of the self, which the narrator, identified with the sadistic/absent mother who destroys the world (or who is destroyed), attacks by placing in a cylindrical hell. They also represent the depressed parts of the self (and possibly the mother) that the narrator wants to lose. There is an echo of Watt’s ambivalent treatment of the rats, which he simultaneously nurtures and murders, in a complex enactment reflecting his experience of abandonment.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 203 23/9/02, 11:03 am 204 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

The beings in the cylinder appear driven by a need to connect with a primary source of love, and the intrapsychic world of the narrator (as revealed in the fantasy) fluctuates between saving the beings (as living parts of himself or fantasies/memories of living, loving others) and destroying them (thus destroying the bad mother). Hope in such a world is complex and ambivalent. The narrator informs us: From time immemorial rumour has it […] there exists a way out […] One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading […] to nature’s sanctuaries […] The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining […] of these two persuasions the former is declining in favour of the latter […] This shift has logic on its side […] whereas the partisans of the trapdoor are spared this demon [i.e. hope] by the fact the hub of the ceiling is out of reach. (206–7) The denizens of the cylinder maintain an ambivalent, primary hope in the possibility of life. Like the being in ‘neither’, who walks ‘as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again’, they shuffle between two theories of escape from a dying world. A door of hope alternates with one of resigned despair, between a sense of undeniable entropy and entrapment, and a chance to change and move outwards into uncertainty. The beings embody both an indefatigable, noble lust for life, as well as a demeaned, futile magical belief in salvation. These poles are in constant flux within the story, much as the temperature and lighting are in a subtle, modulated transition between cold/dark and heat/light. Ambivalence lives within the narrator as well – hope is initially presented as ridiculous, which is then qualified: ‘So much for a first aperçu of this credence […] its fatuous little light will be assuredly the last to leave them always assuming they are darkward bound’ (207). Again, there is an admixture of emotion – hateful, murderous feelings are directed towards the lost ones, exemplified by a mocking, cynical depiction of their dream for escape (‘fatuous’), but there is an immediate negation of this stance (‘assuming’), darkness may not be their final outcome. The mocking quality is reminiscent of the ending of Waiting for Godot: Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? […] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (91)

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 204 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 205

Vladimir, himself ensnared within the schizoid dilemma, waits hopelessly/hopefully for an absent source of internal integration. Like the mythical trapdoors or tunnels of ‘The Lost Ones’, Godot represents a gateway to life, an escape from the barren internal stage upon which the tramps wait for ever. There is a similar ambiguity about whether there is a malicious consciousness behind the perpetuation of this apparent delusion. The ‘someone’ who watches him ‘sleep’ in ignorant, hopeful bliss could be malevolently enjoying his anxious suffering; Vladimir himself here reflects a kindly quality, since he has been watching over Estragon’s sleep with maternal concern. This paranoid space is the world of the narrative-self. There is an uncertain connection to another, which listens, contains, and can be trusted to hear the actuality of the self. Guntrip (1975) describes this sense of ruptured primal connection in his reflections on his analysis with two of the major thinkers in psychoanalytical history, Fairbairn and Winnicott. He explains how all his life he struggled to come to terms with early childhood experiences of his mother’s emotional coldness. This culminated when he witnessed his younger brother lying dead in her lap when he was about three years of age. He had complete amnesia for this experience, but its impact was seen in a lifelong, recurrent exhaustive form of depression that occurred whenever he was separated from close fraternal friends, and in lifelong images of tombs, buried men, and death that filled his dream world. One dream in particular motivated his seeking analytical help from Fairbairn: ‘I was working downstairs at my desk and suddenly an invisible band of ectoplasm tying me to a dying invalid upstairs, was pulling me steadily out of the room. I knew I would be absorbed into her. I fought and suddenly the band snapped and I knew I was free’ (Guntrip, 1975: 150). It is this ‘band of ectoplasm’ that pulls Molloy forward on his journey, that draws Murphy to Endon, that keeps May pacing in quiet antici- pation of her mother’s need for pain-killers, and that ‘ties’ Vladimir and Estragon to Godot. It is a tie of a dying hope, but a hope nonetheless, of an engaged, living relationship with a mother experienced as absent. Guntrip’s journey to inner peace began during his long analysis with Fairbairn. He began to understand his tie to an absent internal mother, but he always felt there was more, an experience of an ‘earlier mother who failed to relate at all’ (Guntrip, 1975: 152). He felt he must reach this Knott-Mother before he could live, and he eventually began work with Winnicott. At one point in his analysis with Winnicott, he mentioned that

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 205 23/9/02, 11:03 am 206 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

people often commented on his ceaseless activity and energy, and then said he did not like silent gaps in the sessions. Winnicott responded: ‘Your problem is that that illness of collapse was never resolved. You had to keep yourself alive in spite of it. You can’t take your ongoing being for granted. You have to work hard to keep yourself in existence. You’re afraid to stop acting, talking, or keeping awake. You feel you might die in a gap’ (Guntrip 1975: 153). This is the gap into which the narrative-self continually fears it might fall, alternately engulfed into the mind of a dominant other for whom it does not exist, or into a void where others do not exist at all. More fundamentally, there is the feeling that it cannot exist without being held, heard, seen within the mother’s mind, within the container into which it has projected itself as a primal text. After Winnicott’s death, Guntrip had a series of dreams, each moving him back in the narrative of his life. One night, he dreamt he was about three, and looking anxiously for his mother; he hoped she would notice him and his brother, but she was staring off into space, silent and ignoring. The next night he had the following dream: I was standing with another man, the double of myself, both reaching out to get a dead object. Suddenly the other man collapsed in a heap. Immediately the dream changed to a lighted room, where I saw [my brother] again. I knew it was him, sitting, on the lap of a woman who had no face, arms or breasts. She was merely a lap to sit on, not a person. [My brother] looked deeply depressed, with the corners of his mouth turned down, and I was trying to make him smile. (Guntrip, 1975: 154) Guntrip tries to awaken his own infantile-self (in his attempt to make the child smile), just as the narrator of ‘The Expelled’ tries to contact the child in the shop. It is subtly ironic that the double reaches for a dead object, only to crumble into a heap. The meaning of ‘object’ is significantly ambiguous here, referring both to an inanimate thing and to ‘person’. The double’s collapse is symbolic of an emptied, devitalized aspect of Guntrip’s self, experiencing itself as alone and adrift (just as many of the characters in Beckett experience this state as central to their subjectivity). The next dream-element is his mother with his dead brother/self in her lap. This is a not-mother, providing no emotional nurturing for the self, filling her child with deadness instead. She is faceless, armless, breastless, and unknowable. She manifests in Beckett as the ever absent, ever promising Godot, as the deadly indifferent Knott, in the cold, unseeing eyes of Endon, and as Krapp’s ‘love’ in the punt. This is the frozen heart of loneliness is itself

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 206 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 207

paradoxical. It is this place that Guntrip and the narrative-self must both avoid (to be able to live, if inauthentically) and revisit (to feel the hope of reunion, the chance for change with the internal mother that will allow authentic life). In this place, the core feeling of the narrative- self is born: ‘I can’t go on’ (without the security of the love of a good internal mother), ‘I will go on’ (to escape this frozen, dead world). It is of note that Guntrip does not comment on any feelings of jealousy for his young brother, or rage at the mother, in his analysis of the dream. For him, the explorations provided some solace, some movement; for the narrative-self, the exploration is ongoing and inescapable. The narrative-self itself becomes the mother, abandoning hopeless characters in worlds devoid of genuine love and attachment. This is the heart of the womb-tomb, where birth and death are one, and there is no space in between for a self to emerge. However, perhaps there is, for why else would the narrative-self speak at all? For in this space, with the (not-)mother, there is no real other. It is a place before any genuine contact, so there remains a hope for contact; this is why the narrative- self is so intent on starting over, on getting a new start before this place of the basic fault, a start with a living (and loving) other. It is in restarting that hope lies, since there is no final escape from a closed world. Again, a dead mother could be mourned, taken into the self; a mother who is there, but unseeing, faceless, unhearing, keeps the self alive and searching for connection. As in Ohio Impromptu, all manifestations of the narrative-self come to the same end, with no finality. In that short piece, there is again a dominant theme of primary disconnection from a maternal, containing figure, as Reader tells a tale of ‘a last attempt to obtain relief [by moving] from where they had been so long together to a single room’ (285). Hoping to escape the pain of mourning (or celebrating) this separation, this ‘birth’, the subject of the tale attempts to erase all sense of internal presence by going ‘out to […] back to where nothing ever shared’ (285–86), reverberating between an unfelt mother and an unfelt self, holding himself together through long, repetitive pacing in a place before an actual, living mutuality. Listener, who hears the tale, controls its flow, much like Knott controlled the servants with the bell. This highlights the sense that the tale is a depiction of an internal enactment, with separation at its core: ‘Could he not now turn back? Acknowledge the error and return to where they were once so long alone together. Alone together so much shared. No. What he had done alone could not be undone. Nothing he had ever done alone could ever be undone’

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 207 23/9/02, 11:03 am 208 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

(286). There is a condensed confusion reminiscent of Watt’s walks with Knott; a precarious sense of existence that is constricted, shared on the edge of mutuality, but then pulled back to protect an isolated self from a failure of containment. Childhood ‘terrors of the night’ stifle attempts at individuation, and like the figure in … but the clouds … the subject of the tale struggles to survive these torments alone, until the dawn. The tale contains within itself its own genesis – a man arrives one night, sent by the ‘dear one’, and begins to read to the subject of the story, until finally this ‘reader’ is instructed by the ‘dear one’ that there is not need to ‘go to him again’. There is a sense in which this ‘tale within a play’ suggests early connections to a calming mother, a connection that becomes suddenly disrupted, aborted. There is a complex blurring of self and other, as the ‘subject’ of the tale can be viewed as the Reader of the play, retelling the events that led to this state of affairs. The central point is the sense of entrapment within the self, and more fundamentally, the attempt to reach a primal, internal other/auditor, to be understood, contained. Reader, an infantile part of the narrative-self, relates a primal text, in the hope its processing by Listener will allow for its amendment, and a subsequent amendment in their relationship. If both Listener and Reader are parts of the same underlying self, then Listener’s control of Reader’s telling mirrors the tale within it. The telling becomes the method of entrapment in both instances, an enmeshment with a primary object. This piece mirrors the dream of Guntrip in its intensity, and one can view Reader’s telling as somehow nurturing to the Listener (‘words are food’), with Reader reversed into a parental role, calming Listener with the tale, and with his subjugated telling. The tale, locked into repeated, aborted, false rebirths, kills authentic experience, destroys creativity in the infantile, exploring part of the narrative-self that Reader represents. The tale-within-the-play, sent by the ‘dear one’, operates like the bell in Kohut’s vignette, it is a displaced reminder of the existence of the ‘dear one’, whom the listener of the story can neither escape, nor connect to. The tale-within-the- play is the prototype of the relationship of Reader and Listener; Listener becomes an internal, controlling ‘dear one’ that robs Reader of his primal tale, never contains it, or allows it to just to be. Just as the tale sent by ‘dear one’ requires a controlled hearing, the telling of the tale by Reader is a forced, controlled telling. Reader becomes the subject of the tale, an infantile-self entrapped within readings-as-primal- texts that reflect each other and the enclosing relational space. In the end, the play depicts a closed-off section of the self, in which multiple

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 208 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 209

aspects of infantile separation are played out, as Reader and Listener sit for ever in the neither-world, with only words for hope, as the story becomes their only other: So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. Through a single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed? To light of day. To sound of reawakening. What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told. (287–8) This is the narrative-self’s own dream of the absent, primal auditor. No light from the world, and only two becoming one, minds ebbing into mindlessness. Heeding only each other, frozen hearts as stone, with no chance of rebirth. It is a place of paradox, where the self is lost into a frozen other, but where this frozenness protects the self from a frightening world, as eggs/stones/stories hide in an internal nest-space, safe from a devouring, projected sea. Until … the next tale. For although within the text of this piece there is no hope of psychic rebirth, inter- textually the narrative-self moves on, hoping for attachment through speech with whatever listener, whatever auditor, there may be, hoping for another who can contain the loneliness, the need for a love that will allow for change. There are images in ‘The Lost Ones’ of this disconnection from the primal mother, which can help explain the relationship between the narrator and the parts of itself within the cylinder. The beings are aspects of the narrator’s own search for connection and, as well, punished others from whom the narator feels unattached and raging. Thus we are told: Bodies of either sex and all ages from old age to infancy. Sucklings who having no longer to suck huddle at gaze in the lap or sprawled on the ground in precocious postures. Others a little more advanced crawl searching among the legs. Picturesque detail a woman with white hair still young to judge by her thighs leaning against the wall with eyes closed in abandonment and mechanically clasping to her breast a mite who strains away in an effort to turn its head and look behind. But such tiny ones are comparatively few. None looks within himself where none can be. Eyes cast down or closed signify abandonment and are confined to the vanquished. (211)

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 209 23/9/02, 11:03 am 210 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

The centrality of primary disconnection is explicit; some of the ‘sucklings’ gaze in trance-like states. Others ‘sprawl’, withdrawn, depressed, their precociousness echoing the birth of Larry Nixon in Watt, as both are robbed of early maternal attunement. There is the poignant image – infants crawling, already beginning a hopeless search for connection, among a forest of legs belonging to nameless strangers who do not see them in any real way. The young woman appears old, withdrawn, feeding her baby mechanically, mirroring her own sense of abandonment. Her nurturing complements the starved, repetitive bingeing of Mary in Watt, and the mother of Guntrip’s dream, echoing the repetitive tale sent by the ‘dear one’ that becomes the child’s primal, internal text. Her child is disconnected, straining away, looking, pleading with the world for recognition, as the narrator moves on to discuss the adult ‘vanquished’ (in whom the life force has ebbed). The statement ‘None looks within himself where none can be’ is importantly ambiguous – the double negative suggesting both despair (there can be no self within – no subject-‘none’ lives within, since there is no mother-as- object-‘none’ within), and hope (the infants, as subject-‘none’, do not look within, but search outwardly for possible reparation). In either case, the incompleteness of the self rests on a ruptured maternal connection, the infants are internally unwitnessed. Immediately, there is a description of the effect of primal abandonment on the vanquished: Eyes cast down or closed signify abandonment and are confined to the vanquished […] They may stray unseeing through the throng indistin- guishable to the eye of flesh from the still unrelenting […] They may crawl blindly in the tunnels in search of nothing. But normally abandonment freezes them both in space and in their pose […] It is this makes it possible to tell them from the sedentary devouring with their eyes in heads dead still each body as it passes by. (211) Alone in internally dead worlds, the vanquished are the most deeply despairing parts of the narrative-self, their dead eyes signalling their abandonment by the narrator as a primary object. They are the proto- Endons, Knotts, and ‘she’s, wandering so far away from life as to be searching for the nothing that is annihilation, but that is also a descriptor for the mother’s absence as presence. There remains a sense of primal hunger for attachment (‘devouring’), related to sight and recognition, and the description of their internal world as an actual ‘frozen’ place brings it in line with the schizoid experience of entrapped enclosure found throughout the oeuvre. The intensity of the searchers,

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 210 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 211

and its relation to primary connection, is reflected by the comment that ‘the sedentary call for no special remark since only the ladders can wean them from their fixity’ (219, italics mine). Through its containment of aspects of the narrator’s self, the cylinder behaves as an encompassing mind; it serves as a primal textual container (in both senses), holding primary experience within it, both as a physical place, and as a space where words become things. The denizens experience total dependence on this space; it becomes, in accordance with the state of the narrator, a place that enacts a slow, entropic dance towards a hopeless death, or a sphere that protects from the nothingness outside. The following passage reveals an aspect of this: What impresses in this gloom is the sensation of yellow it imparts […] it throbs with constant unchanging beat and fast but not so fast that the pulse is no longer felt. And finally […] there comes a momentary lull. The effect of those brief and rare respites is unspeakably dramatic to put it mildly. Those who never know a moment’s rest stand rooted to the spot often in extravagant postures and the stillness heightened tenfold of the sedentary and vanquished makes that which is normally theirs seem risible in comparison […] But a brief ten seconds at most and the throbbing is resumed and all is as before. Those interrupted in their coming and going start coming and going again and the motionless relax. (213–14) The sudden silence is catastrophic, understandable within the symbolic field of the passage. The containment of the cylinder is the only tie to existence for its inhabitants; the sound that emanates within is a spectral connection to another being, when this sound ceases, it signals a fundamental change in their relationship. In other words, this sound imparts actual agency into their world, suggesting the existence of someone other. The imagery employed (the ‘throbbing’ of a ‘constant unchanging beat’ of a ‘pulse’) places this external presence within a human context, this experience is essentially an intra-uterine one. The beings feel this sound the way the foetus connects to the mother through her heartbeat, the dominant experience of otherly presence during life in the womb.13 The cessation of this sound, signalling the death or withdrawal of the source of life, understandably triggers a reaction that shakes even the most vanquished to their psychic foundations – the loss of the mother is synonymous with an apocalypse of the self. This metaphorical construction touches the core thesis of this study – the internal experience of the mother is the fundamental shaping force of the world, and its loss is felt as annihilation.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 211 23/9/02, 11:03 am 212 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

This experience of silence elucidates the tension within the oeuvre between the need for ongoing sounds/speech and a desire for silence. When felt as an invasive or controlling (reflecting a particular sort of early experience with the primary object), there is a wish for silence, experienced as a sense of autonomous identity, or, at the extreme, as a final suicidal escape. Alternatively, words are soothing, functioning as containing objects that enwomb the self; this touches Guntrip’s feeling of disconnection from Winnicott, during silences in their therapeutic work. His analysis proved fruitful, he began to tolerate silences that had once terrorized him. During one such silence, he lay on the couch, and felt relief when he heard Winnicott move in his chair behind him. Winnicott said: ‘You began to feel afraid that I’d abandoned you. You feel silence is abandonment. The gap is not you forgetting mother, but mother forgetting you, and now you’ve relived it with me’ (Guntrip, 1975: 150). Guntrip is here a Beckettian hero, waiting in vain for genuine engagement with the mother, in terror of the abandonment that means annihilation. Being unheld in the mother’s mind is death to the infantile-self in Guntrip, and to the narrative-self. This would be the inevitable consequence of a self like the one described in Proust, which exists in a fragmented, desperate tie to an eternally changing other. Guntrip experiences Winnicott as a containing, maternal presence, and in the spaces and silences there is disconnection, because he has not properly internalized the other’s remembering. These are the ‘great red lapses of the heart’ (61) that terrorize the narrator of ‘The Calmative’, reflecting the fear that another beat will not come, within the self-as- body, much earlier within the intra-uterine otherness of the maternal mind. Without this primary presence to protect the unshakable pillars of his being (a presence which is the most primary of those pillars), this narrator, a manifestation of the narrative-self, faces a psychic annihilation worse than death. It is this possibility that makes a birth away from Knott, Endon, and Godot impossible, forcing a wandering in schizoid space, since birth is into an incomplete, fragmented, unremembered death. An appreciation of the primal connection to the mother makes sense of the conclusion of the ‘The Lost Ones’. In the last paragraph, the narrator says: ‘So on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained a last body of all by feeble fits and starts is searching still. There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall’ (222, italics mine). The slow, entropic march towards total annihilation is

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 212 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 213

ambiguous, an end that is ‘unthinkable’ because no self exists that can think it. The narrator qualifies the inevitability of this end by stating ‘if this notion is maintained’, that is, maintained by itself. This suggests a possibility for hope, for internal change, and though it cannot be guaranteed, it is felt to be within the narrator’s control, to some degree. This last ‘body’ is, in fact, the body/self of the narrator, now confronting the world within the cylinder, within the mother’s mind; this body represents the last, most regressed part of the self, searching within the primal object for life and connection. The others are now ‘dead’, though this is again ambiguous; are they merely ‘dead still’ (i.e. motionless) or ‘still dead (i.e. no change in their deceased status)? The title of Beckett’s last published work, Stirrings Still, echoes this ambiguity, suggesting a deep ambivalence between a hope for final silence of death, and a hopeful hiding.14 The ‘abandonment beyond recall’ helps explain the most defeated parts of the self. This primary abandonment by an early object, (i.e. Winnicott’s breakdown that has already occurred, but is forgotten) is now part of the self, though not consciously retrievable, something close to Guntrip experience of primal loss as an abandonment beyond his conscious recall. In ‘The Lost Ones’, the ‘last of all if a man’ slowly rises to open ‘his burnt eyes’ (223, an echo of Murphy’s attack on the unrecognizing eyes), searching the world for a last time. This world is an omnipotent reflection, and projection, of the narrative-self; this ‘aged vanquished of the third zone has none about him now but others in his image motionless and bowed’ (223, italics mine). The final moments of the story point again reflect an internal, primal disconnection: The mite still in the white-haired woman’s clasp is no more than a shadow in her lap. Seen from the front the red head sunk […] There her opens then his eyes this last of all if a man and some time later threads his way to that first among the vanquished so often taken for a guide. On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into its place. (223) The image of the infant in the mother’s arms recalls Guntrip’s dream, his own sense of early disconnection, as well as his rage. The child appears as a shade, and with the mother becomes the innershadow/ outershadow of ‘neither’; it is unrecognized, no longer in existence, a complement to the fading maternal imagos of … but the clouds …, Ohio

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 213 23/9/02, 11:03 am 214 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

Impromptu, Watt, and so forth. The narrator/‘last one’ desperately attempts to connect to this primary, internal mother, within his mind, within hers; she is ‘the guide’, a ‘first one’ needed to lead the child into life, the ‘last one’ struggles, ‘devouring’ her face with the love hunger of an infant. This forms the other side of the constellation, the ‘devouring’ reflects the infant’s primal, raging need to take in, reflected in Guntrip’s faceless mother, and in a patient’s dream of a breast-less mother. In an image reminiscent of many scenes in the oeuvre (e.g. Krapp in the punt; Murphy with Endon, Vladimir’s pleas to be seen, and so forth), the narrator enters the mother through her eyes. There is ambiguity in this image: the ‘calm wastes’ can suggest an inner relief within a woman who has escaped, in a Murphy-like fantasy, from a world of terror and hell. However, the image can also re-enact a primal connection, between the aged woman as mother and this ‘last one’ that represents the creator of this dying world. This is the junction of hope and despair, of sadness and rage, of a wish for hiding and rebirth, and a wish for destruction. There is a sense that this woman, this final ‘mother’, is destroyed, killed and removed, and that the ‘last one’ is finally free of desire for a connection to her. Equally though, this can be a re- enactment of a truly primal scene, one that engenders the narrator’s creation of the cylinder as a means to separate from this experience. The final line of the piece echoes this ambiguity: ‘So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unthinkable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained’ (223). We are left with a final uncertainty (‘roughly speaking’) despite the often mathe- matically precise nature of the story. It suggests that this ‘last one’ may become a ‘first one’ and that a circular return is beginning again (‘for the first time bowed his head’). The past is ‘unthinkable’ because an unintegrated self cannot remember an ‘unthinkable’ trauma that has not been processed, made ‘thinkable’, by a maternal mind; it is this failure that is the primal trauma. Perhaps this describes the genesis of the story – if one recognizes the narrator in the guise of this last one, this final statement reflects the origins of the story. It becomes a description of the narrator’s own state, which engenders the fiction as a projective attempt at surviving annihilation anxiety by projecting rage, and hope, into the text of a maternal cylinder. It is another attempt at creativity, at establishing a psychic/textual skin with another, an attempt that must occur even if it is to be within the enclosed, circular space of the same story, begun yet again, for the first time.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 214 23/9/02, 11:03 am The dispeopled kingdom 215

Notes 1 This unintelligible voice, reflecting a deeply withdrawn, inhuman aspect of the self is revisited in Not I. It also echoes the deeply withdrawn part of the narrative- self heard through Lucky. The narrator’s relation to the boy recalls that of Vladimir to the Boy in Waiting for Godot, in a reversal – it is the boy who arrives, unlike Godot, to feed and nurture the narrator/infantile-self. This boy tends goats as the Godot boy’s brother does, and there is a sense that the narrator, like Vladimir, connects to an earlier aspect of himself by meeting the child. In Endgame, Hamm takes in a starving child. 2 The maternal relation depicted by the words ‘taught me all I know’ is echoed in Waiting for Godot, where Pozzo claims that it is Lucky who taught him all these beautiful things. 3 There is an allusion to the death of the child in All That Fall, where presumably ‘discouragement’ does sap [Mr Rooney’s] foundations, if he, in fact, does throw the child under the wheels of the train. Thus, the ‘horizons’ (infantile-aspects of the self) are destroyed. 4 A child is probably murdered in All That Fall, where there is a blurring between sadness at the loss of a child (by Mrs Rooney), and rage by her husband. In the early story, ‘A Case in A Thousand’, the theme of actual childhood death is already taken up, and there is a hint of something amiss between Dr Nye and the mother of the dying child, who once was his own ‘mother’ (i.e. nanny). 5 These ‘burning eyes’ contrast with the lifeless eyes encountered elsewhere, where deadened parts of the self are projected (i.e. Endon, Krapp’s lover, the ‘mother’ in ‘The Lost Ones’). 6 Buster Keaton, who starred as O, commented that he felt the work demonstrated one could hide from a lot, but never from oneself. The climax of Film, where O finally faces his observer, can be viewed as a possibility for psychic change: the pursuing other is finally recognized as part of the self. This echoes Vladimir’s near realization that Godot is already present within him. 7 This plant will make its reappearance as the tree in Waiting for Godot, which also hovers between life, leaves and hope, and permanent withering and death. 8 There is, of course, a sense that what the narrator would like to expel is this internal sense of badness (like Lucky’s hard stool). In a way, the narrative-self does just this, as it projects these feelings into the story. 9 The small child is unable to contain a whole sense of the parent’s presence, its endurance in time. One night, while I lay next to one of my small daughters as she fell asleep, I did not respond to one of her questions, hoping she was just about to nod off. She started up, panicked, saying ‘Daddy, talk! Say something!’, reflecting Vladimir’s sense of primal abandonment from Godot’s presence, and his need for Estragon to speak so that he can feel real, in being heard/alive within his partner’s mind. 10 This recalls Murphy, who sought this ‘void’ in Endon, failing to realize it was driven by his own internal identification with a failing internal object, and that Endon was coming to life. 11 In a sense, the cylinder operates as Endon’s chessboard, a primal game, a communication of contact and withdrawal. The reader, perhaps, plays the role of Murphy.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 215 23/9/02, 11:03 am 216 Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

12 Baker (1998) discusses the primacy of the ‘wellhead gaze’ within the story, as well as the loss of the internal good object and the centrality of the female figure. 13 I have witnessed this sense of connection to heart sounds from the other side, as a mother is often overwhelmed when hearing the sound of her foetus’s heartbeat for the first time on the monitor. 14 Are the stirrings (of the mind/the body) now still, quiet, finally gone? Alter- natively, is there a sense in which there are still stirrings, and a possibility for change and rebirth? Alternatively, of course, and more ominously, this could also suggest the possibility of more suffering.

John Robert Keller - 9781526121189 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 03:21:18PM via free access

Keller_06_ch5+Epil 216 23/9/02, 11:03 am